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Ant-Man and the Wasp’s funniest jokeis a visual pun: Michael Douglas’s quantum scientist character, Hank Pym, shrinks his laboratory to carry-on luggage size and pulls it with a handle behind him. He really believes in taking his work home with him.

The smaller the gag the better in this tiniest of Marvel superhero sagas. Let big guns like Iron Man, Captain America and Black Widow defend the universe in The Avengers: Infinity War; leave Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and his newish ally the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) to get on with more important things like saving their families.

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Peyton Reed returns as director and Rudd joins with four other writers for a witty screenplay laden with pop-cult references — including a shout-out to the 1954 mutant ant movie Them! But there are slightly larger concerns than the ones posed in Ant-Man back in 2015.

The sequel finds Ant-Man’s alter-ego, Scott Lang, a penitent ex-burglar, still trying to prove himself as a good father to his adorable daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson). That’s hard to do while he’s confined to house arrest in his San Francisco home for alleged misdeeds like helping the good guys in Captain America: Civil War.

The film cuts superheroes and their oh-so-serious issues down to size. When Cassie interrupts a Very Important Meeting to FaceTime with her dad, it’s a funny reminder of what really matters.

Lang is also trying to figure out what he means in romantic terms to Hope van Dyne, a.k.a. the Wasp, the hyper-competent but ice-cool daughter of Dr. Pym, a brainiac ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who created the hi-tech suits that can make their wearers tiny or huge with the twist of a knob.

In short, Lang is still pretty much a screw-up like before, especially when his Ant-Man suit starts malfunctioning and his size controller erractically shifts from “tiny” to “giant.” It doesn’t help his credibility that he’s still hanging with fellow ex-cons Luis, Dave and Kurt, who are played for comic relief by Michael Pena, Tip “T.I.” Harris and David Dastmalchian.

But duty calls and this time it calls from the quantum realm, the micro universe that Pym investigates as part of his research into shrinking and enlarging people. The quantum realm resembles a cross between the busy bloodstream of Fantastic Voyage and the giant soap bubble of Annihilation. It’s where Pym’s wife, Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), vanished 30 years ago, when Pym was the original Ant-Man and Janet was the original Wasp, during a mission that saved the planet from nuclear devastation but tore their personal world asunder.

Is it possible Janet is still alive? That’s the 10-cent question, to use an ant-sized analogy for what becomes a plot-driving rescue plan.

Two new antagonists seek to plunder all things quantum for their own purposes: mysterious shape-shifter Ghost, a.k.a. Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen) and common gangster Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins). Ghost, who seems destined for future development, has family ties of a sort to Laurence Fishburne’s Bill Foster, a former lab associate/rival of Pym’s.

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The quantum stuff doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, something that Lang himself observes: “Do you guys just put the word ‘quantum’ in front of everything?”

Reed, Rudd and their co-conspirators riff off Hitchcock’s The Birds for a San Francisco Bay sequence where Ant-Man summons flying ants to help him pursue an escaping bad guy. The insects oblige, but they keep getting eaten by ravenous seagulls.

Rudd is more comic than heroic, as always, leaving most of the cool fight-scene action to Lilly’s winning Wasp, who does nifty things like suddenly enlarging a salt shaker to knock out a thug. She and Rudd make a fine pair, both as crime busters and canoodlers.

This is the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to have a female character’s name in the title. Lilly is given ample screen time to make that distinction more than mere tokenism, which is no small achievement.

Peter Howell is the Star's movie critic based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm

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